Because I’m big on vacation and spending time with family, we decided to make this weekend mostly about fun, which I think is very important to recharge the battery on a consistent basis. To me, this means completely withdrawing from work and focusing on the family. The toughest part of this for me is making sure that I put my Iphone away, so I don’t answer emails, phone calls, or texts. What normally happens is my wife and I agree that I will have my phone on me all day, but only use it if we need to look something up like the location of a restaurant or directions to somewhere we need to go. Other than that, the phone is off limits, as are the computer. This doesn’t happen every weekend, but at least there’s a conversation about when it needs to happen.

So, thankfully, I was able to not go ‘To Work’ on the weekend, and as a result, my wife was very happy with me. I do feel very refreshed and ready to attack the week in a very productive fashion. Turns out that while we were eating at Steuben’s on Saturday, we struck up a conversation with a guy who owns a Real Estate Company in Fort Collins. Brad Sawatzky runs Colorado Real Estate Pros, which can be found here:www.coloradorepros.com. Brad has been in Real Estate for quite a while, and just split off from another company to begin his own venture. We invited Brad and his wife Erica to sit down with us and struck up a conversation about the leap of faith that is starting your own company.

Welcome to my new Blog, Engine 21! I’m an Entrepreneur with a flavor for seeking out great opportunities, and looking to partner with hungry people who are gearing up for developing a Freedom based lifestyle. My motivation is driven by so many different things, but mostly on the fact that I want to spend quality time with my family while also making enough money to live very comfortably. My goal is to find people and companies who are driven by helping other people and companies achieve success, whatever that different level of success may be.

I recently have moved to the great state of Colorado, and am seeking investment opportunities. These can be in the form of Real Estate, which is my primary area of expertise, as well as other opportunities with Start-Ups, which I am getting more accustomed to. The wealth of information that I’ve been able to glean from other individuals and companies has been the number one reason why I do what I do on a daily basis.

I just was informed of a startup called BillHero. I’m not going to post a link to them quite yet because they have not launched their product nationwide just yet, but their concept is really cool.

BillHero was started by a group of Fort Collins entrepreneurs that have a little bit of knowledge in the start up game. Most of the partners have been involved in multiple businesses, start ups, and know what it takes to get something very sophisticated launched. They have poured a ton of time and money into a financial application that is aimed at college students and anybody in a shared rent situation who share bills. When I was in college, me and my roommates would share bills, and go through the pesky situation of writing each other multiple checks per month for rent, utilities, food..You know the drill. I had the distinct pleasure of being the guy who would take the rent checks to our landlord every first of every month to drop off the rent. Between that and all the other house expenses, sharing bills is a major hassle.

What BillHero does is gets all roommates set up on one system to pull the funds automatically from their bank accounts, with a backup of a credit card, and then sends the checks to the appropriate companies when the bill is due. No more hassle of someone going to drop off checks, no more hassle of writing multiple checks in one month. Basically, this takes care of everything. As a roommate, you simply have to go into the app once you get a bill, enter the amounts of the bill, and BillHero takes care of the rest. How simple and easy is that?

I wish I had this back in the day, because it might have saved me some angst, and saved some relationships from deteriorating because of financial squabbles between immature roommates. Too bad this wasn’t around when I was in college. AND, I wish I would have thought of this concept a long time ago, although I’m sure building all of this with the website framework has to be thousands of hours of collective work.

Physical fitness is something that I’ve neglected in the recent, and not so recent past. For the most part, I get into a good gym routine, then work gets in the way, and I stray from it, simply because taking the time to work out is not a priority. Unfortunately, as I get older, and I see my daughter looking up to me, I need to make sure that I take care of myself and get to a good physical place so I can stay on this Earth for a while.

For this reason, I just joined the Denver Athletic Club (check them out at www.denverathleticclub.cc). Upon starting my membership, just like any good health club, I was offered two personal training sessions. The goal of the health club, and every health club, is that you will not only become a regular user of their facilities, but that you will use their personal training services on a consistent basis. Since I’ve joined, in the last two weeks I’ve been to work out a minimum or 4 times a week (I’ve gone actually 10 times total, but who’s counting?!), and found a really good fitness routine.

I’m not a big weight lifter. Something about going into the weight room to lift barbells and dumbbells has never appealed to me. But the last two weeks have been kind of a turn back into the weight room because of some of the exercises and routines that my trainer (Thanks Rob!) created for me.

Basically, he incorporates just about every body part into every exercise, which for me helps to get over doing something with one body part. I think that’s what turned me off so much about lifting weights all along, was just working out one muscle at a time. To me, that seemed so wasteful when I knew that I could do so many other things that were productive.

My primary problem now is that I’m so inflexible, for example I can barely touch my toes, that my muscles get sore so easily, and I have to stretch non-stop to get my muscles to a point where I can feel good about working them out again. Rob told me to get my lactic acid going when I’m sore, so doing things like walking or jogging when I’m sore is great to get the sore out, so to speak.

Just over the last two weeks, I’ve dropped about 5 pounds, and that might be even more if my diet would get better. Baby steps, I keep telling myself. I’m only about 40 pounds overweight, so I’m looking at this as a marathon, and not a sprint. At least my mind works that way, so I’ll keep doing the little things to make my body feel much better.

The other thing that I know will come with my increased physical fitness will be more mental alertness, and more mental energy to be able to complete business tasks, which I know is so important. I can’t tell you how many times I wake up at 5am, and need to get a ton of work done over the course of a normal work day (entrepreneurs don’t really have normal work days…) but I’m so tired from working so late that my productivity isn’t really shooting through the roof until about 9am.

The thing that I look forward to the most because of my increased physical fitness? Being able to chase my daughter around endlessly. That’s what drives this goal.

Next time on Engine021, how to prioritize each day to make it the most effective!

Most successful people I know need a bit of motivation on a daily basis. I get mine from watching videos every morning, and reading out my morning ‘affirmations’ as I like to call them. I read the same exact thing each morning, which is kind of like a mission statement of sorts. It basically states what I want to accomplish in life, what the most important things in my life are, and therefore makes me concentrate on them a bit more throughout my day while I’m working my tail off.

The motivational videos I search for simply consist of a Youtube search for ‘Motivation’. If you type that keyword in to Youtube, so much pops up that it’s sometimes difficult to choose what to watch. At first, I had a tough time choosing what to watch, but now I simply pick one out, and watch it, without distractions, from beginning to end. You wouldn’t believe the impact that this can have on your daily productivity, if you actually pay attention to what successful people are saying in a video. Try making this be the very first thing you do after you wake up and get ready for your day, and you’d be amazed at what you can achieve.